Maria-Florina Balcan


Maria-Florina Balcan is a Romanian-American computer scientist whose research concerns algorithms for machine learning, including active learning and kernel methods, and algorithmic game theory, including random-sampling mechanisms and envy-free pricing. She is an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Education and career

Balcan is originally from Romania, and earned a bachelor's degree in 2000 from the University of Bucharest, earning summa cum laude honors with a double major in mathematics and computer science. She continued at the University of Bucharest for a master's degree in computer science in 2002, and then earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 2008 from Carnegie Mellon University. Her dissertation, New Theoretical Frameworks for Machine Learning, was supervised by Avrim Blum.
After working as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England, she became an assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing in 2009. She returned to Carnegie Mellon as a tenured faculty member in 2014.

Service

Balcan was program committee co-chair for three major machine learning conferences, COLT 2014, ICML 2016, and NeurIPS 2020. She is the general chair for ICML 2021.

Recognition

Balcan is a Microsoft Faculty Fellow, a Sloan Research Fellow and a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow. She was the 2019 winner of the Grace Murray Hopper Award of the Association for Computing Machinery, for her "foundational and breakthrough contributions to minimally-supervised learning".